Vico's New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology PDF
Preview Vico's New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology
VICO'S NEW SCIENCE OF ANCIENT SIGNS The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico is primarily known as a philo sopher of history. But his main intention was the foundation of "science," true and secure knowledge, in the tradition of Bacon and Descartes. Con trary to both, Vico bases "science" on the "political world," on society and culture, instead of on nature or pure reason. The political world is mainly a world of signs and languages, and know ledge is always mediated through signs and languages. Hence, Vico's philosophy is a linguistic (or sematological) turn of philosophy-the first linguistic turn in the history of philosophy. This book reads Vico's fasci nating New Scienr:e as a landmark in language (and sign) philosophy. Vico's sematology and his theory of signs (semata in Greek) contain important insights into the function of signs and language for human thought, the relation between images and language, gestures and language, and memory and language. These ideas are discussed within the framework of eighteenth-century philosophy and with constant attention to contempor ary linguistic and philosophical discussions. Vico's New Science of Ancient Signs will be essential reading for advanced students and academics within the fields of linguistics and philosophy. Jiirgen Trabant is Pmfessor of French and Italian Linguistics at the Free University, Berlin. His main fields of research are the history of linguistics and language philosophy, and semiotics, especially semiotics of literature and language politics. Sean Ward is a writer and translator. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is co-editor, withjurgen Trabant, of New Essays on the Origin of Language ( 200 I ) . Copyrighted Material ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS Series Editor: Talbot Taylor 1 LINGUISTICS AND THE THIRD REICH Mother-tongue fascism, race and the science of language Christopher M. Hutton 2 WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Three American stories from the first half of the twentieth century Julia S. Falh 3 ETHNOCENTRISM AND THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY Phil Benson 4 THE BATTLE OVER SPANISH BETWEEN 1800 AND 2000 Language ideologies and Hispanic intellectuals Edited byjosi de! \ralle and Luis Gabriel-Stheernan 5 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS E.FK. Koerner 6 VICO'S NEW SCIENCE OF ANCIENT SIGNS A study of sematology Jiirgen Tmbrml 7 UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR IN SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION A history Mwgmet Thomas Copyrighted Material VICO'S NEW SCIENCE OF ANCIENT SIGNS A study of sematology jurgen Trabant Translated from the German by Sean Ward Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene ~~ ~~o~;~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK Copyrighted Material First published 2004 by Routledge 11 Ne"· Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE SimultaneouslY published in the USA and Canada bY Routledge 29 West 3'ith Street, New York, 1\TY 10001 Raul/edge is 1111 i111print of the Taylor & Francis Gmup Neue Wissenschaft von a/ten lrichen: Vicos Sematologie © 1994Jiirgen Trabant This translation © 2004 Routledge Typeset in BaskerYille by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by anY electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter im·ented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrie,·al system, without permission in writing fi·01n the publishers. British Libnuy Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library I.ibnuy of Congrm Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-30987-S Copyrighted Material CONTENTS Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene Vll Translator's preface Xlll References, editions, abbreviations, acknowledgments XV Introduction 1 1 Mr. Vico, Renato, and philology 4 2 Vico's discovery: poetic characters 24 3 Gestures and objects ( semata), words 34 4 The common mental dictionary 61 5 To speak by writing (Derrida-Rousseau) 81 6 To speak by singing (Herder) 93 7 Memoria-fantasia-ingegno 106 8 Vico and Humboldt on imagination and language 123 Notes 141 References 147 Index 153 v Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material FOREWORD It is a pleasure to have .Jurgen Trabant's work available to an English reading audience. Until now those who did not read it in German had access to some of Trabant's interpretation in his essays in New Vico Studies that appear here in new translation as Chapters 5 and 6. When Neue Wissenschafl von allen Zeichen appeared as a Suhrkamp pocketbook in 1994 it was evident that Professor Trabant had advanced a full interpretation of Vico that was unique in Vico literature. Rereading it in the English trans lation of Sean Ward has caused me to rethink its ideas. Trabant states the thesis of his work quite clearly at the beginning, that "Vico's philosophy is not really a philosophy of language but a philosophy of signs." To capture this idea Trabant has used the term "sematology" instead of "semiotics" or associated terms. It is certainly correct to compre hend Vico's philosophy as a philosophy of signs rather than a philosophy of linguistic signs. Language is only one among a number of types of signs or "symbolic forms," as Ernst Cassirer calls them. Cassirer regarded Vico as the real discoverer of the myth and a turning point in the hist01-y of the philosophy of language, as he makes clear in the first two volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He also saw Vico as the founder of the philosophy of the Kultunvissenschaften, as he explains in his Logic of the Cultural Sciences. At the basis of culture is not language but the phenomenon of human expression that is formed by the sign or symbol. In the third chapter Trabant remarks that Vico reconceives the classical notion of the human being, not as animal rationale or linguisticum or plw neticurn, but, in Cassirer's terms, as animal syrnbolicurn, the term Cassirer coins in An Essay on Man to characterize the sense in which the sign or symbol is the unifying feature of human culture and to emphasize that human rationality always finds its embodiment in the symbol. For Cassirer one form of thought is not more "symbolic" than another. The images of poet1-y and myth are symbols as are the ciphers of mathematics. They are different types of symbolism, each with its own logic, but both originate in the distinctively human power of the symbolic act. Cassirer's and Vico's philosophies are not the same, but there is a great sympathy between VII Copyrighted Material FOREWORD them. They both support the point present in Trabant's thesis, that the philosophy of language is too narrow an approach to understand the basis of the human world; we must turn to the wider notion of a philosophy of signs, a sematology. Vico's doctrine of signs is closely tied to his conception of a "common mental language" or "common mental dictional)'" that he mentions only a few times, although prominently, in the New Science. This is a concept that Vico's commentators have remarked on but at the same time avoided. Trabant's work, against this tradition of the commentators professing the common mental language to be an obscure idea ofVico, has an extensive analysis of its meaning and importance, calling attention to its presence in the first New Science of 1725. One of the welcome features generally of Trabant's approach to Vico is his attention to the relation between the 1725 New Science and the second version of 1730/ 1744, a relation that most commentators ignore, concen tl-ating solely on the later version. Much is lost of a means to understand Vico by ignoring the statements in the first edition. The common mental language is a case in point. The first New Science contains a chapter on the nature of this idea, and it is one of the three passages of the first New Science that Vico declares should be preserved and reprinted, if necessary, alongside the second version, to properly grasp his thought. The common mental dictionary is formed, Vico says, from the divine language of acts and objects, with natural relations to the ideas they signify, the heroic speech that followed immediately from it, and the prose speech, the articulate language of the distinctively human institutions that succeed the heroic world. Vico philologically works out the nature of these three languages that comprise the common mental dictionary, through analysis of particular words in particular languages. Trabant points out that "There is obYiously nothing a priori about the common ideal language. It is not a dictionary of pure concepts in the Kantian sense. Instead, the eternal properties of its mental words originate in the poetic characters, the semata" (p. 66). Trabant also says: "Universal common mental words constitute mythology in its broadest sense. This is Vi co's version of concrete uniYersals" (p. 67). Vico's conception of the particular in the universal is rooted in his doc trine of "poetic characters" or "imaginative universals," which is the subject of the second chapter of Trabant's work. Trabant rightly stresses that Vico's theory of poetic characters or imaginative universals is not simply a logic of the imagination. Trabant says: "The universal nature of the poetic characters links Vico's discovery with the project of a new science in the strict sense of a science dependent on reason" (p. 30). Imaginative universals are not just universals inherent in poetic wisdom understood as a part of the human or civil world. Imaginative universals are the universals actually underlying historical and empirical data. VIII Copyrighted Material FOREWORD By contrast, one can point here, I think, to Kant's "reflective judg ment," his doctrine of the reflektierende Urteilskraft of the third Critique. This is a type ofjudgment in which the particular is grasped as having universal meaning, but such judgments are confined to the sphere of the aesthetic and organic. They are offset by determinate judgments which subsume a particular under a rule, such as found in scientific and theoretical thought. The Kantian subjective universal is not truly universal in the Vichian sense of what is truly original and primordial. Vico regards imagi native universals as not simply a key to part of culture but as a key to culture itself. Imaginative universals are truly universals and are at the basis of his science. Trabant maintains that Vico's common mental language or dictionary is not only a subject of Vico's science; it is also employed as the language through which Vico's science is realized. As Trabant says: "it is what ensures that the project is truly scientific. It is the new language appropri ate for a new science" (p. 72). This is to say that Vico thinks from the standpoint of the meanings of the common mental dictionary. He intends to have a universal understanding of the world of nations to say what the civil world actually is. Against the historicist approach to Vico, Trabant rightly points out "the universalistic bent" to Vico's thought. He argues that although Vico opposes the civil to the natural world, this does not mean he conceives the historical world in the terms of a modern historian of thought. As Trabant states: It above all does not mean that he distinguishes, in the manner of Wilhelm Dilthey, the method proper to the human sciences (which seek to understand individual historical forms) from the method proper to the natural sciences (which seek to explain natural phenomena). On the contrary, Vi co upholds the tradi tional standards of scientific inquiry. He does not propound a hermeneutic theory of science. (p. 74) Vico's atm is a new science of the civil or human world that will stand alongside the new science of the natural world. It is good to have this claim of Vico so clearly stated, as there has been so much confusion on this point, so many attempts to modernize Vi co's conception of histOI)'. Although Vico makes a distinction between the science of the civil world and the science of the natural world on the basis of his principle of verum et fru"l'urn convertunltu; this does not mean that there are two differ ent forms of thought involved. The natural scientist aims at the principles of natural events, the knowledge that results will remain incomplete because the objects to be known are not made by the knower. The natural scientist comes closest to making the object in the construction of IX Copyrighted Material
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